The technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development

Why do you think students will better learn to spell without spellcheck?

As far as I can tell spending class time on spelling per se and/or grading students on spelling mistakes is a complete waste of time and focus.

The ideal way to teach spelling is (1) get kids to read a whole lot, (2) show students their mistakes in context when they make them on as short a feedback loop as possible, without judgment.

It’s plausible that showing that a mistake was made but then forcing the student to retype or rewrite the word correctly (without letting them just click once on the word to fix the mistake) would be more effective.

But I have seen no evidence that spellcheck reduces people’s ability to learn spelling. I’d like to see some kind of formal study.

Disclaimer: I think giving every 1st grade student a chromebook is a terrible mistake.

I only ever write on a computer. I own a single pen which I have not needed to replace since I moved into my apartment in 2016. I'm pretty sure I last used it in November, when I had to fill out a form for jury duty.

The article cite studies that handwriting is linked to brain development, and reading on paper improves memory, and so on... I'm certainly not in a position to refute those studies, but I have to wonder how complete they are. People once denounced the printing press for causing us to loose our memories, and as a population, we do in fact have worse memories than scholars during the Middle Ages. If we taught intensive memory training in school, memory would likely improve, but do you think that would be an ideal use of student time?

Maybe handwriting is a magical art that improves brain function across the board, but I'm going to need a lot more evidence before I believe that. In the meantime, we should be teaching the skills that people need in today's world, and that overwhelmingly means typing.

Then again, engineers and computer programmers routinelly introduce their kids to scratch, hour of code, code combat, general programming, hacking things and what not.

At the high school level, kids of my collegues (especially boys) have significant advantage compared to kids of other people.

I heard of an OLPC-like program in Peru that builds a wooden laptop with a Raspberry Pi brain to be used to "improve education". While the Peruvians deserve all props for being able to mass-produce a low-cost laptop for even the poor in their community, my hot take was, if they wanted to improve education, give each kid a THEC64 and limit their exposure to an hour (okay, maybe two) a day. Have them spend the rest of their free time outside.

I think computers have the most to teach us when we are the ones teaching them (i.e., programming them), and that the promise of 1980s computers was that they could do whatever you want (that was within their capacity), the drawback being that they came with very limited functionality out of the box and must be programmed (or loaded with external software) to be useful; whereas today, computers and computer-like devices such as phones come with lots of functionality out of the box, but they do things that might not be what you want. (Crash due to brittle OS/drivers, sudden UI or functionality changes due to "mandatory updates", DRM, spyware...) This plus the ready accessibility of obscene or offensive content makes me very wary about giving internet-connected devices to the very young (< 14 years or so). If kids are to be exposed to computers, we should teach them to be their masters, not their slaves. And we should strictly temper screen time, because their growing bodies and minds need time outside more than they need time in front of a screen.